not going to copy out Daluge’s funeral eulogy (although it is quite amusing, given that the two men hated each other), nor Himmler’s interminable encomium for his subordinate. I think I’ll quote Hitler instead, because at least he kept it short:
I will say only a few words to pay homage to the deceased. He was one of the best National Socialists, one of the most ardent defenders of the idea of the German Reich, one of the greatest opponents of all the Reich’s enemies. He is a martyr for the preservation and protection of the Reich. So, my dear comrade Heydrich, as head of the Party and as Fuhrer of the German Reich, I award you the highest decoration that it is in my power to bestow: the medal of the German Order.
My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision. I flick through the photos of the funeral cortege crossing the Charles Bridge, going back up to Wenceslaus Square, passing in front of the museum. I see the beautiful stone statues on the balustrade of the bridge with swastikas beneath them, and I feel slightly sick. I think I’d rather take my mattress to the gallery in the church, if they’ve got a bit of room for me there.
240
Evening, and all is calm. The men are home from work, and in the little houses the lights are going out one after another. The houses still exhale the pleasant smell of dinner, mixed with the slightly acrid stench of cabbage. Night falls on Lidice. The inhabitants go to bed early because, as always, they’ll have to get up early tomorrow to go to the mine or the factory. Miners and steelworkers are already sleeping when a distant sound of engines is heard. The sound gets slowly closer. Covered trucks move in single file through the silence of the countryside. Then the motors are silenced, and a continuous clicking sound is heard. The clicking extends through the streets like liquid rushing through tubes. Black shadows spread all over the village. And then, when the silhouettes have congregated in compact groups, and when everyone is in position, the clicking stops. A human voice rips open the night. It’s an order shouted in German. And so it begins.
Torn from sleep, the inhabitants of Lidice understand nothing of what’s happening to them—or they understand all too well. They are dragged from their beds, they are driven from their houses with rifle butts, and herded into the village square, in front of the church. Nearly five hundred men, women, and children, dressed hastily, stand there dumbstruck and terrified, surrounded by the uniformed men of the Schutzpolizei. They cannot know that this unit has been brought here specially from Halle-an-der-Saale, Heydrich’s hometown. But they do know that nobody will be going to work tomorrow. Then the Germans begin to do what will soon become their favorite occupation: they divide the group in two. Women and children are locked up in the school, while the men are led to a farmhouse and crammed into the cellar. Now they must wait, interminably, the anguish etched into their faces. Inside the school, the children weep. Outside, the Germans are let off the leash. Frenetically but conscientiously, they pillage and ransack each of the ninety-six houses in the village, plus all the public buildings, including the church. All books and paintings, considered to be useless objects, are thrown from the windows, piled up in the square, and burned. Anything considered useful—radios, bicycles, sewing machines—is taken away. This work takes several hours, and by the time it’s finished, Lidice is in ruins.
At five in the morning, the soldiers come back to get them. The inhabitants find their village turned upside down and filled with running, shouting policemen who continue to plunder everything they can find. The women and children are taken in trucks toward the neighboring town of Kladno. For the women, this is the first stage on their journey to Ravensbruck. The children will be separated from their mothers and gassed in Chelmno—with the exception of a few judged suitable for Germanization, who will be adopted by German families. The men are assembled before a wall where the mattresses have been dumped. The youngest is fifteen, the eldest eighty-four. Five are lined up and shot. Then five more, and so on. The mattresses are there to prevent the bullets ricocheting. But the men of the Schupo are not as experienced in such matters as the Einsatzgruppen, and—with all the pauses for carrying away the corpses and forming new firing squads—it takes forever. Hours pass while the men await their turn. To speed the process up, they decide to double the rate and shoot them ten by ten. The village mayor, whose job it is to identify the men before their execution, is among the last to be killed. Thanks to him, the Germans spare nine men who are not from the village but simply visiting friends and trapped there by the curfew or invited to stay the night. They will, however, be executed in Prague. When nineteen night workers return from their shifts, they find their village devastated, their families vanished, the bodies of their friends still warm. And, as the Germans are still there, they, too, are shot. Even the dogs are killed.
But that isn’t all. Hitler has decided to vent all his frustrations on Lidice, so the village will serve as a means of catharsis and as a symbol of his avenging rage. The Reich’s inability to find and punish Heydrich’s assassins provokes a systematic hysteria beyond all human bounds. The order is that Lidice must be wiped off the map— literally. The cemetery is desecrated, the orchards destroyed, all the buildings burned, and salt thrown over the earth to make sure that nothing can ever grow here. The village is now nothing more than a hellish furnace. Bulldozers have even been sent to raze the ruins. Not a single trace of the village must remain, not even a hint of its former location.
Hitler wants to show people the price to be paid for defying the Reich, and Lidice is his expiatory victim. But he has committed a serious error. It is so long since Hitler and his colleagues lost touch with reality that they do not anticipate the worldwide repercussions that will be provoked by news of the village’s destruction. Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. In the days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS who will be let loose but an entity whose power he does not fully grasp: world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people will fight with the name of Lidice on their lips—and they’re right. In England, miners from Stoke-on-Trent launch an appeal to raise money for the future reconstruction of the village and come up with a slogan that will be echoed all around the world: “Lidice shall live!” In the United States, in Mexico, in Cuba, in Venezuela and Uruguay and Brazil, town squares and districts, even villages, are renamed Lidice. Egypt and India broadcast official messages of solidarity. Writers, composers, filmmakers, and dramatists pay homage to Lidice in their works. The news is relayed by newspapers, radio, and television. In Washington, D.C., the naval secretary declares: “If future generations ask us what we were fighting for, we shall tell them the story of Lidice.” The name of the martyred village is scrawled on the bombs dropped by the Allies on German cities, while in the East, Soviet soldiers do the same on the gun turrets of their T34s. By reacting like the crude psychopath that he is (rather than the head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the month the international propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.
But on June 10, 1942, neither he nor anyone else is aware of all this—least of all Gabcik and Kubis. The news of the village’s destruction plunges the two parachutists into horror and despair. More than ever, they are wracked by guilt. No matter that they have fulfilled their mission, that the Beast is dead—no matter that they have rid Czechoslovakia and the world of one of its most evil creatures—they feel as if they themselves have killed the inhabitants of Lidice. They also fear that, as long as Hitler does not know them to be dead, the reprisals will continue indefinitely. Enclosed in the crypt, all of this churns over and over in their heads, until—exhausted by the nervous tension—they reach the only possible conclusion: they must turn themselves in. In their fevered brains they imagine asking to see Emanuel Moravec, the Czech Quisling. When they see him, they will hand over a letter explaining that they are responsible for Heydrich’s assassination; then they will shoot him, and kill themselves in his office. Lieutenant Opalka, Valcik, and the other comrades in the crypt need all their patience, friendship, diplomacy, and persuasiveness to convince the guilt-ridden parachutists not to go through with this insane plan. First of all, it’s technically unfeasible. Second, the Germans will never take them at their word. Finally, even if they managed to carry out their plan, the terror and the massacres had begun long before Heydrich’s death, and would continue long after their own. Nothing would change. Their sacrifice would be completely in vain. Gabcik and Kubis weep from rage and powerlessness, but they end up being convinced. All the same, no one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything.
